Hyper-negging by the Klausner Protection Squad

Poster "Helen" added a very insightful comment. Notice that the comment is closed due to a large number of negative votes on it. Here's how it looks when you first arrive to this page (click on the image for a full-size picture):

Now, let's open it (click on the image for a full-size picture):

An eminently reasonable comment, well articulated — read it: what is there so offensive that ten people negged it (the lone positive vote is mine)? Moreover, dusting off our old vote-observation skills obtained in Maestro Harp's trenches a while ago, I'll notice that the total was 0 of 5 when I arrived there. And what you see on the picture (1 of 11) appeared upon the next browser refresh, just a few minutes on — does it look like in this short time period five more people just happened to visit there and vote on this comment (and none in the hours afterwards) OR is it more likely that one obsessed idiot with ten sock-puppet accounts voted ten times in a row, hurriedly so as be finished before he is taken back to his padded room? The thread is "tracked by one customer", notice that too. So, once again: why does Amazon still allow no-purchase accounts to be used for comment voting? How is voting on comments different from voting on reviews? One more computer glitch that is amazingly shill friendly?

Kindle Author Challenges Amazon To Fix Rankings System

From MediaBistro: Dianna Dilworth writes:

[...]Author Thomas Hertog authored a book on how he worked the Amazon rankings system to get an inflated ranking. [...] called The Day the Kindle Died [and sold as eBook, it] was allegedly removed from the Kindle store earlier this month [...]

The removal got the book a lot of attention on Twitter [,] and Amazon took the opportunity to e-mail their disapproval to the author. Hertog showed us the e-mail and this is what it said: “”…customer reviews and sales rank are an important source of information for customers…” and “we will not tolerate efforts to manipulate it.”[...]”

Yeah, mostly, it seems, by way of deleting any commentary bringing this sort of shenanigans to the public's attention — see Why is Amazon Deleting Comments? below... Or this: the same day as poster Manny R Brooklyn suffered this Amazonian wipeout, another familiar poster, Ghost(Ghost(M)), also a target of a past "deleted-by-Amazon" wipeout, suffered a precipitous fall in reviewing rank: from about 200,000 to below 8,000,000 — although there has been no change in his vote totals! Apparently, this has been another revenge action by the Klausner Protection Squad(TM), but the interesting thing is that they unwittingly demonstrated that such manipulation of reviewing ranks is possible. Either this can be done from the outside, or they have "their man" on the inside, but in the absense of an appreciable change in amassed public vote, such a strange move would seem to require direct tweaking.

And, developing this disquieting thought even further: is this perhaps the reason for Harriet's surprising ranking resilience over the last year or so? After all, right after Amazon changed the rating algorithm (in Oct 2008?) she fell from No.1 by a good four hundred places in a matter of days, yet lately her reviewing rank has been bobbing about 760: it goes a bit under and then immediately floats back up. Why such a sudden change from what to all appearances was a free fall to a persistent buoying at a stable level? Perhaps her rank gets daily adjusted "by hand" by the "Team Harriet"? After all, if it's possible to bring someone's rank down by over seven million places w/o any observable change in his voting totals, it should be possible to effect the opposite change too, no? Harriet, are you really ranked 759, or has this amazingly stable level been achieved "with the little help" from your silent but hyperactive friends? What's the real rank now, the Top Fifty Millionth Reviewer or something? Just how (if at all) "intolerant" of such manipulations is Amazon in reality? A lot seems possible that you'd think wouldn't be (and we can start simply from Harriet's habit of posting 250-300 reviews every month — is this not manipulation? No one can read that much, and then of course, there's the issue of all-positiveness of her reviewing record). Anyway... something to think about. Dear Reader, if curious, read more on the Hertog Affair (it's a google search).

Disregard any Amazon Review with a "Top 10 Reviewer" Label on It

On something called Consumerist, an obviously intelligent fellow by the name Chris Walters writes in an article called The Fakery Behind Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers":

Amazon reviews, especially the effusive ones, have always been suspect—you never know when a five-star review came from an employee, publicist, or marketing type. Slate describes the dishonest world of Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers," where a small group of writers churn out purple-prosed blurbs and jacket-ready compliments at an astounding rate, sometimes for a fee. In turn, these reviewers are inundated with a sort of fame as well as free merchandise—mostly books in the past, but now electronics and other goods. Because good reviews sell more books, Amazon has no incentive to weed out the reviewers who have turned the system into a cottage industry. We suggest you disregard any review with a "Top 10 Reviewer" label on it. [Emphasis mine] [...]

My thoughts precisely — except I don't think "the group" is small, and I would extend the final suggestion to all reviewers with a "Top" denomination, be it "Top 10" or "Top 50" or even "Top 1000" (I just don't believe a normal independent bookreader (rather than a hired review-writer) will be willing to write a gigantic number of reviews that is necessary in order to break into the "Top" reviewer ranks).

Personally, I do read reviews when buying stuff there, but I start from going directly to one- and two-star reviews. If they make good sense, that's the end of this item — I don't even bother with positives, since I trust the authors/publishers to manufacture any number of gushingly extatic five-starrers for every piece of crap on earth. Otoh, if the negatives are not terribly convincing, I will peruse positive reviews too — but I always read them, analytically, not just let the bare fact that there are such reviews motivate me to reach for my wallet.

Iow, there are two approaches to dealing with Amazon reviews these days:

(1) If you're a moron, do NOT pay any attention to them (lest you get owned).

(2) If you do want to use them, don't be a moron — read them carefully; begin with the negatives. Never pay much attention to any particular review's starrage and especially "helpfulness" (voted, purportedly, by the public, but I bet, mostly by the shills, who vote "for" their and friends' reviews so as bump them up, and "against" the low-starrage-dealing enemies, so as to push them down, out of sight, off the first page; for more on that see our Publishing giant Elsevier in hot water over hiring shills, The Belkin Saga (hiring shills on Amazon), and Why John T. Reed does not sell his books on Amazon any more (a.k.a. Amazon “fixes” review problem)).

Why is Amazon Deleting Comments?

On March 8 Amazon poster Manny R. Brooklyn added a comment with a link to an article on this blog (right below: Klausner Protection Squad negs comments but doesn't vote for review itself). This comment was immediately deleted by Amazon (Manny got blown off the site too). Why? Needless to say, Amazon never offers an explanation. But based on past experience, it's never been a problem to add a link to a comment under a review: it's done a lot. So it's not that there's an Amazon guideline not to post links. Then, one must conclude, the reason for this Amazonian deletion had something to do with the article the link lead to. Is Amazon hiding something here? What and why?

Stats Update: In the last half a year Harriet Klausner reviewed

Thanks to an inquisitive poster we now have exact numbers for Harriet Klausner's contribution to Amazon reviews system during the last half a year.

[...]on Mar. 10, 2011 4:59 AM PST Guy the Gorilla says: [...] For those keeping track, here's a quick summary of her latest activity:

- 228 "reviews" in September 2010
- 296 "reviews" in October 2010
- 187 "reviews" in November 2010
- 192 "reviews" in December 2010
- 185 "reviews" in January 2011
- 229 "reviews" in February 2011

And so far in March, and it is only the 10th of the month, 90 "reviews," so the possibility of a banner, 300 "review" month remains a distinct possibility. [...]

Good! Now let's get some averages. We can easily see that Harriet has left her old ten-year average of just-about six (6) books a day behind (her fist reviews under the current account had been posted in late November 1999). Also, to refresh our memory: these daily averages are calculated from the number of reviews actually posted — remember how Harriet (reportedly) explained the all-positiveness of her reviews record? Here's how: she reviews only the books she liked; the ones she read but didn't like she does not review. So she reads even more books than she reviews. And so, here are her recent averages (only the good books):
- September 2010 daily average, books/day: 7.6
- October 2010 daily average, books/day: 9.55
- November 2010 daily average, books/day: 6.23
- December 2010 daily average, books/day: 6.2
- January 2011 daily average, books/day: 5.97
- February 2011 daily average, books/day: 8.18

- March 2011 (first 10-days) daily average, books/day: 10

---

Note: Remember, in her profile, Our Lady of Faux Review says she was born with a gift of speed-reading, and that she reads two books a day. We don't have to believe this either, but even if we did, we can see that she actually reviews three to five times more books than she herself claims to read. The former number includes only the books she liked, the latter all books she tried to read, including the ones she didn't like and, consequently, didn't end up reviewing. Hmmm..... so she reads more books than she then reviews, yet she posts more reviews than the overall number of books she claims to be able to read! The Klausner Paradox.

Klausner Protection Squad negs comments but doesn't vote for review itself

Poster Guy the Gorilla raises an interesting issue:

Guy the Gorilla says:
It's either 22 mentally deranged people, or the same mentally deranged person circling back for the 22nd time.

I wonder if it may be Harriet herself, like I said earlier. If you'll notice, not one of these 22 "defenders" has thought to vote Harriet's original review itself as helpful. That is very odd. Makes me think it's her, and she can't bring herself to vote for her own review [...]

No, no, no. Come one, why would one suspect Harriet of such cowardice? The issue, I'm guessing, is far simpler. Let's go back some five-to-eight years.

Back then anyone could post reviews: you only needed to register with an email address and a password (the email address didn't need to be valid). So you could set up any number of accounts and start posting reviews (to your own books, for example, which is still done a lot — I'm gonna be posting an article about it soon). Then, in the mid-2000s some time Amazon started to require a purchase to be made from an account before it could be used to post reviews and comments. I'm not sure what this was supposed to ensure, since one could still set up any number of such accounts; the only difference was that it would cost you something because every time you'd need to buy something. But, since there's always been a lot of very cheap items there, this requirement would hardly deter an author/publisher flunkey intent on promoting own wares. Amazon could definitely see which such accounts belong to the same person (they shared credit-card personal info), but they have never done anything to prevent the operation (as far as I could see, at least). Anyway, now you need to buy something in order to start posting reviews and — and this answers your question, I believe — vote on reviews.

At the same time, and for the reasons I can't even begin to guess, voting on comments still does not require a purchase, so just like in the good old days of the Amazonian free-for-all, an easy-to-create no-purchase account is enough: when on the "create account" page, all you need is to type in something looking like an email address (blahblah@jibberjabber.net would do) and a password into the entry fields, et voila: you can vote on comments now. Why the difference? Hell knows. Since Amazon proved time and again that they're exceptionally friendly towards the shill — all their software glitches just happen to somehow enable reviewing shenangians and disable anyone trying to talk about it — maybe they wanted to leave one more non-obvious avenue for the shills to manipulate the site: we the veterans is one thing, but I'm sure that a casual visitor would be discouraged if his comment were hit by a large number of negs; this is entirely normal (shills used to do that with enemy reviews themselves: if you ever said something about their crap (in any context), next day you would find your own reviews massively negged).

So, getting back to your over-negged comments, it's quite likely that some member of the Klausner Protection Squad tasked with discouraging of the detractors set up a large number of no-purchase accounts that he then used to neg your and others' comments. The reason he doesn't vote for Harriet's reviews is that he can't: his no-purchase accounts do not allow him to vote on reviews — to overcome that he needs to buy something at least once from every account, and he's probably too cheap for that. Could it be Harriet herself? Why not? Of course it could.

Note: I haven't recently re-tried all these things I'm talking about above; so all this info is at least a year old. But it seems that things still work the way they did back then.

Five Stars! Roger von Oech reviews books by... Roger von Oech

Here's America's Creativity Guru Roger von Oech reviewing Expect the Unexpected (Or You Won't Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus by... Roger von Oech. Five stars, incidentally. A very good book, he really liked it:

Roger's new book is a fun read. [Notice that just like Colonel Gaddafi, Mr von Oech speaks of himself in the third person — this demonstrates the great humility of the two men.] It clearly shows his passion for the ideas of Heraclitus. I think he's done a great job of translating them into practical techniques on how to be more creative. The stories and tips are a delight. I was actually surprised to discover how well a thinker from 2,500 years ago speaks to the current issues. [...]

That's not all. Here Roger reviews X-Ball (Magnetic Design Set), by, um, you guessed it — Roger von Oech. Also five stars.

[...]This X-Ball is a whole lot of fun! I heartily recommend it. It'll put "white caps" on your "gray matter.

Clearly, this is another winner! Neither is this everything! Roger is really keen on letting the public know about real good stuff: here Mr von Oech reviews Innovative Whack Pack, an interesting product with mixed reviews, made by , er... well, no two ways about it — it's made by Roger von Oech! Mr von Oech happens to like it too:

[...]My favorite way of using the deck is to pick one card at random in the morning, and have it be one of my innovation thoughts of the day. If you enjoyed the Creative Whack Pack, I think you'll get a kick (and some ideas) from the Innovative Whack Pack.[...]

Can you get any tackier? The answer is yes, of course, this is not "rape-rape", and at least he posts under his own name, so it's more like silly than criminal. But even as is, it's pretty tacky. Amazon doesn't mind, naturally.